Shade of Blue and Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War, edited by Steve Berman

 By Nate Feldman

This book is an anthology of ghost stories centered around an American Civil War theme.  In all situations, something supernatural takes place, either during the war itself or years after.  

An example of this would be the story of the guy who drives a trolley in Gettysburg, which each night takes ghost soldiers to the battlefield, where they re-live the battle.

Another example is the ghost of one of the crew members of the Hunley, a Confederate submarine that sunk the Housatonic, a Union ship, wandering Charleston Harbor after his vessel is sunk.

There is also a story of a couple that reside in a house in Bucks County PA, a place where two Civil War vets, one from the Union, the other from the Confederacy, were killed accidentally by the Union soldier's wife when they returned from the war.  The soldier's wife mistook them for intruders.  Now, if anyone in the house sees their spirits, a bad fate befalls them.  

My personal favorite story is of the man who is raising his sister's son.  His sister had a relationship with a former slave.  The man had helped kill the abusive overseer.  But, eventually he killed his sister's lover, and after she died, he raised the boy.  He pens a memoir of the events leading up to the murder, recounting how he was haunted by the ghost of the overseer.

From this book, one interesting fact I learned was of Town Line, NY, a town in Western New York that voted to secede from the Union during the war and didn't vote to be readmitted to the United States until 1946.  This is especially unusual as New York fought for the north, but this one individual hamlet voted to support the south.